Under the overused guise of "security concerns," CSX has asked the state Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services to keep secret its routing and cargo information that federal regulators mandated last month be provided to states.

The rail corporation says it won't share that information if the public is going to be able to look at it. That's an unacceptable end run around the Freedom of Information Law, and the people's right to know about what's proven to be a dangerous and sometimes deadly business.

After at least eight significant accidents involving Bakken crude oil trains since the Lac-Megantic, Quebec disaster last summer, the U.S. Department of Transportation issued an emergency order requiring railroads operating freight trains carrying more than 1 million gallons of the crude to notify states' emergency responders of such trains' paths.

CSX's rationale falls apart on closer inspection. If security really was a concern, the tanker cars carrying crude oil wouldn't be so easy to identify. For that matter, it is obvious where crude oil is being stored, both in trains and at the Port of Albany.

Providing this information to local emergency responders as well as the public would give everyone a much better idea of exactly how much crude oil is being carried over the rails through communities and allow emergency responders to anticipate staffing and resource needs.

Canadian Pacific Railway, according to the Times Union's Brian Nearing, supplied its traffic and routing report to the state and did not seek a confidentiality agreement, but "assumes the state will hold the report as confidential because of policy from the federal DOT, which is advising states to only release data to emergency responders."

The public may not need the same level of detail as emergency responders, such as precise times, but citizens should at least be able to learn how much trains are carrying and where.

"We should be doing everything as a government that advances the safety of the public, and not moving to shield information," said Robert Freeman, executive director of the Committee on Open Government, who says the state should not sign any kind of confidentiality agreement with a private party.

No confidentiality agreement means the state can then decide how to parse the information so emergency responders have what they need and so the public has what it has a right to know.

This would hardly make New York an exception. Already, Washington state has refused to sign such an agreement because it conflicts with its open records laws. That's the path New York should follow.

It's this simple: If a ticking time bomb is rolling through their town, citizens are entitled to know about it, before it blows up. Call it a personal security concern.